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Crime & heists
9 November 1983 – 30 November 1983 · Amsterdam
Hijacking & kidnappingStatus: Solved
Image: Rob Croes for Anefo · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl · Wikimedia Commons
35 million guildersransom, at the time the highest ever paid
In 1983 Freddy Heineken was chairman of the brewing group his grandfather had founded, and one of the richest and best-known people in the Netherlands. Five men from Amsterdam, among them Cor van Hout and Willem Holleeder, prepared the kidnapping for about two years. In a shed on the De Heining industrial estate they built two soundproofed cells behind a double wall. They studied Heineken's daily routine, stole vehicles and devised a route for collecting the ransom unseen.
On Wednesday 9 November 1983, just before seven in the evening, Heineken and Doderer were overpowered as they left the office on the Tweede Weteringplantsoen and pushed into a van. For three weeks they sat chained in their cells. The kidnappers demanded 35 million guilders in guilders, dollars, French francs and German marks and communicated through advertisements and instructions left at agreed places. On 28 November a police officer, following their instructions, slid the bags of money down a drainage chute from the top of a viaduct near Utrecht.
An anonymous tip naming several of the culprits put the police on the trail of the shed. In the early morning of 30 November 1983 an arrest team went in and found the two men, weakened but unharmed. Two kidnappers were quickly arrested and a third gave himself up. Van Hout and Holleeder fled to Paris, where they were arrested in February 1984. Because the extradition treaty did not mention extortion, a legal battle of almost three years followed, during which France temporarily moved them to its overseas territories.
The kidnappers received prison sentences of up to twelve years. Frans Meijer escaped, lived for years in Paraguay and was extradited to the Netherlands only in 2002. The ransom had been buried in barrels in woods near Zeist; the police recovered nineteen million guilders there on 4 December 1983, after a woman out walking had found a marked banknote. About eight million guilders remained missing. Heineken had himself heavily guarded afterwards and died in 2002. Van Hout was shot dead in 2003; in 2019 Holleeder was sentenced to life imprisonment, among other things for ordering the murder of his former partner.